Page 55 of The Kiss of Deception

His face flashes under my eyelids, lighting up my brain, like his exquisite features switched a flip.

Flower Girl looks familiar because we’ve met before. In the darkness of the night, the edge in her eyes had been softened, her hair a curly dark mane—maybe it still is, under the blonde wig—and the smile was aimed at Miles.

Miles.

It’s Miles’s friend.

Lucy.

A cold shiver trickles down my spine, freezing every vertebra into place. I plaster a smile, because, for some reason, I feel like I must smile at the gun that stares me down.

Inside I curse myself for not listening to my intuition when it warned me of her that night, too busy trying to forget things I couldn’t even remember right now.

“Lucy? Why did you bring a gun here?” I’ve been called pessimistic, but I don’t think it’s my fatalism telling me the gun is here for me. “Is it for protection?” I try optimism for once. “Are you afraid of something?”

Lucy doesn’t move one inch, gaze never straying from me, impassive as she answers in the same mechanical tone, “Do us both a favor and don’t play dumb. It’s insulting to our intelligence.”

“I—” I scramble for purchase, palpating the insides of my skull for words even as I seem to have forgotten the alphabet.

I feel the need to squeeze my eyes shut to breathe, but the shiny silver thing stares straight at me, and I can’t stop staring back.

“What have you come here for?” I don’t think my voice shakes, but I also can’t properly hear it through the thunder in my ears. “What do you want from me?”

I can’t fix the problem if I don’t know what the problem is. I can hardly believe my own logical thinking in this moment of panic.

Physically, I think I show no fear. Zoe Westwood was raised to always be in command of the room, never to panic under pressure—or, you know, imminent death.

“I’m undecided.” She’s a robot with a human voice. “I know what I want to do, but I’m almost 100% sure it won’t get me what I want.”

“What do you want to do?” I ask, afraid to know.

“Kill you.” That’s on me. Shouldn’t have asked. “I really want to kill you for laying one finger on my man.”

Miles.

He’s the reason my forehead isn’t embellished with a bullet or two—yet. Lucy thinks Miles loves me. And I remember the way she looked up at him—she loves him, distorted ways and all.

“If you want him, I don’t think hurting me is a smart move,” I try to reason. With the girl who came here to kill me.

“I don’t remember asking.”

“I just… I don’t think he would forgive you, if you hurt me. He’d be devastated. You wouldn’t want to be the cause of his pain, right? Hurt someone you care so much about.”

“Do not trouble yourself,” she says, her inflection never flickering. “He’ll suffer until he realizes you were a waste of time. He doesn’t love you, not like he could love me. He’s just blinded by your pretty face. He’ll get over it quick enough. Soon, he’ll forget you were ever part of his life.”

With each word, she ties a new ribbon around the little vessels in my lungs, cutting off the oxygen in my bloodstream—not because there’s truth in her threat, and she will kill me, if she so decides. Because there’s truth in her words.

Dead or alive, with or without Lucy, Miles was always going to move on and forget my brief existence in his life. It somehow makes my chest even tighter than her threats.

I promise I will figure the tightness later, and not at all avoid it. If I arrive alive at later, that is.

“You’re right. We’re a lie. He doesn’t even like me. It’s all a li—”

“Do not lie to me! I’ve seen how he looks at you.” At what point did we switch scripts? “I’ve seen how you look at him when you think he isn’t looking.”

She steps towards me. I step back. Then again, and again, until we’re effectively inside the living room, and I’m trapped between her and the coffee table that bites the back of my legs.

“You think you can come into our lives and steal what’s mine?” she continues, the gun jerking in my direction, punctuating her words.

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